Robert C. McLeod

Again, it’s the will of the community. If the community is serious about potential relocation, then we would have to look at identifying some resources to start the planning and working with the community on a possible relocation.

Support from the community is the key word here. We would like to see the community committed to this through a formal motion or possible plebiscite, because moving a community will have an effect, especially on the elders who are used to living there and have lived there their entire lives. We would have to have community support to consider it.

We understand the advantages of getting people off the streets and into public housing. That’s why there’s public housing. We have 24 public housing units across the Northwest Territories, and from public housing we like to think that a lot of them can graduate into the home ownership program.

We have approximately 1,600 families we’ve been able to put into the home ownership program over a number of years. We try to be as flexible as possible in getting as many people into some of these programs as we can. For example, with one of the home ownership programs, we allow them to carry up to $5...

Thank you. One of the problems we face in some of the smaller communities is there are not as many transitional opportunities as there are in some of the larger centres, and I think we have to have a look at that. Again, I say if we have units in the communities that are vacant, public housing units, and we’re asking somebody to wait a year, we’d have to review that, and I think we’d have to review some of these on a case-by-case basis to see where we can best assist. There may be some other reasons why folks are not in these houses or in public housing. But I will commit to the Member – and I...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I am not sure if the Member is referring to one year to access public housing programs or the home ownership program. I am pretty sure the Public Housing Program, the residency requirement is set by the LHOs. As far as the home ownership program, that is set by the NWT Housing Corporation. That is set so we could have long-term Northerners be first in line for accessing some of our programs. So if somebody moves here a month before one of the programs, they would have to wait for a year before accessing any of the home ownership programs. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Again, I don’t believe the Housing Corporation or the LHOs are double-dipping into the income. We do go by gross income while they’re employed and then once they’re unemployed, then we would use whatever benefits they may be getting from unemployment insurance.

As far as the Child Tax Credit goes, again, it’s to provide for the basic necessities of life, and shelter is usually number one on the list.

Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker. We’re pleased to have today up in the gallery the president of the Special Olympics NWT, Jane Arychuk. We also have Cappy Elkin, a board member of Special Olympics NWT, Mr. Larry Elkin and Ms. Lynn Elkin. We also had Barb Kardash up in the gallery along with our very special guest Kelton Broome, an athlete for Northwest Territories, who probably had to head back off to school or go training for the next Olympics. Welcome to the gallery. Keep up the good work.

In a lot of the communities they do have the capacity to construct units. We’ve seen that in a number of occasions in the past. We have a lot of our units constructed by local contractors that have the training and knowledge how to build a house. Although there are some challenges in some places, I don’t think that’s primarily one of them.

We do take into consideration the fact that these communities don’t have a private market. The core need income threshold might be a little higher in their community. If you look at the overall percentage of our home ownership programs, they are delivered to...

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. In my discussions with the Member I did say that I was going to look at these vacant units, because I know that we have a number of vacant units across the Northwest Territories and we tried to get as many clients as we could into them. Those clients we couldn’t get into them, we converted a lot of these over to public housing. I will commit to the Member that I need to follow up on the number of vacant units that are on there.

He raises the point of income, and that’s one that we’ve had discussions about as a corporation. We tried a GAP program a couple of years ago...

Mr. Speaker, one of the reasons Housing has been able to implement a lot of these new programs is because we listened to the rent scale review or the…(inaudible)…policy review to a lot of the suggestions that were made out there. This is one that I will commit to the Member that I will go and have discussions with the corporation, because the Member raises a good point about returning back to the community if you are a resident to that community.

Again, those communities with the LHOs are usually set by the LHO. If they have vacant units, I am sure they may look at special situations such as...